[totallywrong]

> Devops doesn't have to be hard. Infrastructure doesn't have to be complex

That's simply not true for anything larger than a few services and a small dev team. The cloud is very complex to do right when you focus on security, performance, and scalability. And Terraform invariably devolves into a nightmare when you have a ton of resources with dependencies between them.

[chologrande]

I'm definitely not google scale, but we're global, in over 300 cities spanning ~30 countries. On an avg day we process well over 25k rps on multiple services. Simple architecture and IaC like terraform is exactly how we manage the dependencies. It's the solution, not the problem.

[dipperdottydoo]

You think you have simple architecture when you’ve introduced Terraform to what is, based on your statistics, a two server use case. A PlayStation is capable of 25 kRPS and probably its data iops, too. Buy another one and you’re HA.

You’re trapped in the complexity of the method and think you’ve achieved nirvana. This comment reminds me of those demos when Hadoop was the rage, where people would do a $4 million Hadoop ETL on their laptop and shut up a room.

[chologrande]

You're assuming you know the use case. We do more than serve LAMP stack. It takes more than a few playstations I can assure you.

[dipperdootydoo]

No, I don’t need to know the use case. There are a vanishingly small number of use cases that cannot be performed 25,000 times per second on hardware from 25 years ago. If you indeed work on one of those few cases, you wouldn’t simultaneously call Terraform and public utility cloud simple architecture for any use case relevant to Hacker News discussion; that’s just plainly false beyond a certain level of computing depth, i.e., after you’ve written a process scheduler in an operating system or a supercomputer. (Note that I’m not calling you inexperienced. I’m talking about exposure to diverse types of computing, or, more realistically, the papers those communities develop.)

Those two ideas, that 25k is hard and Terraform is easy, are incongruous positions to hold from my perspective and basically prove the point I made. I understand if that’s not as obvious to you. The Web and cloud trap people into believing the world you’re living in is computing, and that the computers you’re working with go a certain speed on the road. There’s a lot of infrastructure in between you and computing in the model you’re working in, and it’s not apparent to you as unnecessary to compute. Computers are capable of far, far, far more than the entire industry thinks. That’s why those Hadoop takedown demos made me smile back in the day, and why I can’t wait to demo against $10 million of Kubernetes eating companies of the future alive.

Or yeah, blow my mind with your workload that can’t be tackled in a few shakes of a PlayStation’s tail with strong vector units nearby (the reason I specifically mentioned a PlayStation).

[xylophile]

"I don't need to know anything about the problems you've solved in order to determine that you've solved them incorrectly, and that I'm smarter than everyone, and I'm going to be rich."

Let us know how that works out for you.

[5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV]

I didn't know I could do 25k database requests per second one a PlayStation.

[firesteelrain]

I really don’t understand your argument.

[midasuni]

25krps? As in requests per second? I.e one request every 3 seconds?

[dmlittle]

How do you go from "25,000 requests per second" (25krps) to "one request every 3 seconds"?

[thephyber]

Did you confuse “requests per second” (rps) with requests per day?

[midasuni]

I did indeed!

Clearly more tired than I realised!

[cube2222]

Esp. as you start splitting up your statefiles!

However, I do think that this is mostly essential complexity, rather than accidental one. We're now building systems that are way more secure and/or scalable than before. Least possible network access and permissions everywhere already add a bunch of complexity. Pushing complexity from our code to managed cloud offerings does its part, too. But all of this can be tamed very well with modules and reusable components.

That said, if you're scaling Terraform, I do recommend you to check out the tools that have sprung up in the recent years to manage it. I'll personally recommend Spacelift[0] (see disclaimer). It can help you orchestrate your statefiles once you start having many of them (even tens or hundreds of statefiles in a single workflow are no problem) using stack dependencies, help team members self-serve through blueprints, automate all the things through OPA policies, and generally help you scale your Terraform usage to a larger team.

[0]: https://spacelift.io

Disclaimer: Software Engineering Team Lead at Spacelift, so take the recommendation with a fair grain of salt; I do legitimately think it's a great product though. If you'd like to reach out, feel free to do so through the website or the contact details in my profile.